We will do this in several steps to be able to do a release of MariaDB 10.x roughly every 6 months with many new features in each release, not only from MySQL 5.6. The aim is to have all data-on-disk formats and protocol formats compatible with MySQL 5.6 so that one can upgrade from MariaDB 5.6 or MySQL 5.6 to any MariaDB 10.x release trivially.

I would like to see MariaDB developed to be a practical database; a database which is used to solve the real life problems you are facing today and tomorrow. To be able to do that, we are now actively seeking users, developers, and companies to get involved and help us drive MariaDB in the directions that make the most sense to them.

The ways you and your company can participate are:

Contribute with developer time. If your organization has talented developers familiar with the MariaDB and MySQL codebases they can become part of the MariaDB team and contribute to the development of the MariaDB project.

2012-09-07

While I was at Oscon and later at Froscon, one of the most frequent questions I heard was "When will you release MariaDB with Galera?"

Galera is a multi-master cluster solution for MySQL/MariaDB made by Codership.

The reason for the delay has been that we wanted, before the release, to do some QA testing of Galera so that we know how it performs, it's limitations and possible edge cases. Through this we did find some issues that Codership has acted upon.

As this is the first release of MariaDB with Galera, we have labeled the release as 'alpha'. However, don't let the 'alpha' label scare you too much. Galera has been used in production by people I know and they are very happy with it.

Galera still has some rough edges, which Codership and we will work to eliminate over time.